Christopher Dickey: Noriega's Last Laugh
[Christopher Dickey is the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine.]
The bent, shuffling figure in a porkpie hat shown on the news being hustled to an Air France plane by U.S. marshals on Monday was impossible to recognize as Manuel "the Pineapple" Noriega, the Panamanian dictator I used to know.
Once so vilified that President George H.W. Bush launched a little war called Operation Just Cause to arrest him in 1989, Noriega has served more than 20 years in American jails for his connections to Colombian drug cartels. Now 76, he's been extradited to Paris to spend, no doubt, many years more in the prisons of France, where he's already been convicted in absentia on money-laundering charges.
Noriega's ruthless rise and his precipitous fall are all ancient history now, but it's worth taking a look at his case today not so much to evaluate his crimes as to examine why he thought he could get away with them, and what lessons they may hold for U.S. ties to various useful but treacherous players elsewhere, starting with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai. As a crime-boss-cum-dictator in Panama, Noriega was unique; as one of many shadowy clients and creations of Washington around the world, not so much.
Noriega used to think the United States (or at least the Central Intelligence Agency) would support him no matter what he did, and the way he clawed his way to power in Panama in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to prove the point. Never mind his obvious corruption, his lucrative links to the Medellín drug bosses, the double- and triple-agent games he played with Cuba and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Never mind the allegations that he ordered political opponents murdered, including Hugo Spadafora, a quasi-revolutionary who may have had his own CIA ties and whose body was found in rural Panama tortured, beheaded, and stuffed into a U.S. Mail bag in 1985. Noriega clearly thought that Washington just couldn't do without him. Washington thought he was sliding toward psychosis, but wasn't sure what to do about it.
You're familiar with the pattern. You can see it at work today, most obviously, with Afghanistan's Karzai: the Obama administration has discovered it can't live with him, but it can't live without him, and he knows it. So who is controlling whom? It's far from clear.
At least the disastrous codependency in Afghanistan is mostly out in the open. More often, Washington's key relationships with sleazebags are hidden in the parallel universe of the intelligence services, and once you get a glimpse of them they're enough to make your head spin. Thus London and Washington found it useful to rehabilitate the murderous regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi partly because of his help to MI6 and the CIA in rolling up clandestine nuclear-arms networks. The allegedly genocidal regime of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (just reelected) bought tacit support from Washington back in the 1990s by turning in Sudan's former terrorist allies like Carlos the Jackal.
Until Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he had been considered a friend of America because he was fighting Iran's revolutionaries. During the war Saddam waged against the mullahs from 1980 to 1988, the CIA and NSA passed him vital satellite intelligence, the U.S. Navy protected ships exporting his oil, and American labs even supplied the germ cultures that helped him build a biological-weapons program.
The story of Panama's spooky strongman was a counterpoint to all these other contradictory and confusing intrigues, and his ouster over the Christmas holidays in 1989 was regarded in Washington as a military precedent for wars to come. The official Pentagon history of the incursion summed it up nicely in the first sentence: "Operation JUST CAUSE, one of the shortest armed conflicts in American military history, is also one of the most relevant to campaigns as we anticipate them in the twenty-first century."..
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The bent, shuffling figure in a porkpie hat shown on the news being hustled to an Air France plane by U.S. marshals on Monday was impossible to recognize as Manuel "the Pineapple" Noriega, the Panamanian dictator I used to know.
Once so vilified that President George H.W. Bush launched a little war called Operation Just Cause to arrest him in 1989, Noriega has served more than 20 years in American jails for his connections to Colombian drug cartels. Now 76, he's been extradited to Paris to spend, no doubt, many years more in the prisons of France, where he's already been convicted in absentia on money-laundering charges.
Noriega's ruthless rise and his precipitous fall are all ancient history now, but it's worth taking a look at his case today not so much to evaluate his crimes as to examine why he thought he could get away with them, and what lessons they may hold for U.S. ties to various useful but treacherous players elsewhere, starting with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai. As a crime-boss-cum-dictator in Panama, Noriega was unique; as one of many shadowy clients and creations of Washington around the world, not so much.
Noriega used to think the United States (or at least the Central Intelligence Agency) would support him no matter what he did, and the way he clawed his way to power in Panama in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to prove the point. Never mind his obvious corruption, his lucrative links to the Medellín drug bosses, the double- and triple-agent games he played with Cuba and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Never mind the allegations that he ordered political opponents murdered, including Hugo Spadafora, a quasi-revolutionary who may have had his own CIA ties and whose body was found in rural Panama tortured, beheaded, and stuffed into a U.S. Mail bag in 1985. Noriega clearly thought that Washington just couldn't do without him. Washington thought he was sliding toward psychosis, but wasn't sure what to do about it.
You're familiar with the pattern. You can see it at work today, most obviously, with Afghanistan's Karzai: the Obama administration has discovered it can't live with him, but it can't live without him, and he knows it. So who is controlling whom? It's far from clear.
At least the disastrous codependency in Afghanistan is mostly out in the open. More often, Washington's key relationships with sleazebags are hidden in the parallel universe of the intelligence services, and once you get a glimpse of them they're enough to make your head spin. Thus London and Washington found it useful to rehabilitate the murderous regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi partly because of his help to MI6 and the CIA in rolling up clandestine nuclear-arms networks. The allegedly genocidal regime of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (just reelected) bought tacit support from Washington back in the 1990s by turning in Sudan's former terrorist allies like Carlos the Jackal.
Until Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he had been considered a friend of America because he was fighting Iran's revolutionaries. During the war Saddam waged against the mullahs from 1980 to 1988, the CIA and NSA passed him vital satellite intelligence, the U.S. Navy protected ships exporting his oil, and American labs even supplied the germ cultures that helped him build a biological-weapons program.
The story of Panama's spooky strongman was a counterpoint to all these other contradictory and confusing intrigues, and his ouster over the Christmas holidays in 1989 was regarded in Washington as a military precedent for wars to come. The official Pentagon history of the incursion summed it up nicely in the first sentence: "Operation JUST CAUSE, one of the shortest armed conflicts in American military history, is also one of the most relevant to campaigns as we anticipate them in the twenty-first century."..